Sen. Tom Harkin; once bitten, twice duped (by Castroites)

“Cuba’s a poor country,” Sen. Harkin marveled last week upon returning from Cuba. “But they have a lower child mortality rate than us…their public health system is quite remarkable.”

It’s an old story with this Senator, actually. In April 1985 while President Reagan (Happy Birthday, BTW!) sought to aid Nicaragua’s desperate anti-communist guerrillas, freshman Senators Tom Harkin and John Kerry visited Nicaragua, met with the Sandinista (communist) leaders and returned smitten with their dedication to democracy and their enmity towards the Soviets.

President Reagan’s obsession with Central American communism and his aid to the Contras was a manifestation of simple “McCarthyism,” sneered the freshman Democratic Senators. The proof was in a “peace-proposal” signed by Sandinista leader and Castro-protégé Daniel Ortega that Kerry and Harkin “held in their hands” (Neville Chamberlain, anyone?) and read convincingly to Congress. Its purpose was to kill President Reagan’s Contra-aid bill.

It worked like a charm. The U.S. Congress swallowed the Communist scam hook, line and sinker and killed the president’s bill. Then exactly three days later a snickering Daniel Ortega was in Moscow, flouting his Soviet ties for all the world to see. The Castro-protégé returned to Managua with a $200 million Soviet aid package, along with a bigger pledge of arms and Cuban advisors to crush the Contras.

So Congress, rotten egg dripping slowly off their face, reversed itself and finally approved Reagan’s Contra aid. Harkin and Kerry ultimately failed—but hey, it’s the thought that counts. They did go the extra mile attempting to aid and comfort communists.

The original Sandinista national anthem, by the way, includes the line, “We fight the Yankees –the enemy of humanity,” lifted straight from a speech by Che Guevara. It’s nice to know such an outfit charmed the socks off the current U.S. Secretary of State.

The late George Carlin’s “Hippy-Dippy Weatherman” had a hilarious skit: “The radar is picking up a line of thundershowers,” he says points to the map… “but it’s also picking up a squadron of Russian ICBMs… so I wouldn’t sweat the thundershowers.”

In brief, don’t sweat the small stuff. Perhaps that applies here? To wit: if our very Secretary of State allowed snickering communists to play him like a fiddle, why sweat the same fiddle-playing of a middling and soon-retiring Senator?